610 PROCEEDINGS OP SECTION F. 



With dogmatic prejudice lie prophesies that, "No serious objection 

 will ever be raised to it," and in the same bigoted spirit he adds that, 

 " In its broad sense, the policy of a ' White Australia ' represents tha 

 one question upon which the Commonwealth is inflexibly and earnestly 

 united." Yet nothing could more distinctly emphasize the flagrant 

 inaccuracy of such a statement than the enlightened testimonies I 

 have quoted, including the resolution unanimously passed by the 

 United Australian Chambers of Commerce which assembled in the 

 very capital of Mr. James' own State last year, previously quoted by 

 me, declaring the impossibility of developing the agricultural resources 

 of Northern Australia by white labor. Mr. James then proceeds to 

 illustrate the hollowness and inconsistency of his own attack upon 

 colored labor by admissions mutually destructive of each other. He 

 says — " The white man never troubled about the yellow until the 

 mineowners thought fit to use the yellow man as a threat to bring 

 down the price of labor. A few attempts to do this laid the founda- 

 tions of the bitter hostility of Australians to Chinese . . . and 

 of Australian exclusion laws." It is frankly confessed by the same 

 authority that the arguments subsequently employed as to the Chinese 

 being socially undesirable was an afterthought, to win the support 

 of whites not interested in the wages question in favor of the exclusion 

 of Asiatics. The Labor Party confessedly wanted to expel them, from 

 a dread of them as possible competitors in work. A new and false 

 issue, according to Mr. James, was then raised. Every Chinese camp 

 was specially declared to be a " festering sore in the heart of the com- 

 munity into which all that was foul and low in human character 

 drifted." Mr. James then completely neutralises the force of his argu- 

 ment once more by acknowledging that " the moral lepers were not 

 all yellow. Even some degraded whites drifted to the camps." He 

 further states, nevertheless, that " the Chinaman to-day, in Australia, 

 is a decreasing force ; that ' the camps ' are disappearing in the old 

 mining centres," and that in the cities the Chinaman " is becoming 

 quite European in his dress, and growing more European in his tastes 

 and modes of living." Mr. James unconsciously maintains with start- 

 ling inconsistency that there are filthy whites as well as filthy Chinamen, 

 but that the former are to be tolerated in their squalor, while the China- 

 men, who appear to be gradually adopting habits of European civilisa- 

 tion, are to be excluded as a moral plague, notwithstanding their 

 marked sanitary and social improvement and their special suitability 

 for tropical labor. 



In like manner Mr. James takes exception to " brown-skinned 

 low-caste men from India," on the illogical ground that " they are 

 still Hindoos or Mohammadans, and keep apart from the national 

 life." The fallacy here is that one must be a believer in the popular 

 creeds of a country to be a loyal citizen. Yet the late Sir Leslie Stephen, 

 one of the ablest philosophical thinkers of the nineteenth century, 

 was an avowed Agnostic after resigning the clerical office in the Church 

 of England, and, in the eighteenth century, one of the greatest intellec- 

 tual giants of his age, and one of the most exemplary citizens and loyal 



